Holography of a novel codimension-2 defect CFT

Abstract

We propose and study a new holographic duality between a non-supersymmetric defect conformal field theory (dCFT) and its gravity dual. On the gravity side, the defect is realised by a novel solution of a D5 probe brane embedded in the $AdS_5\times S^5$ geometry. The D5 brane wraps an $S^2\subset S^5$ and accommodates $k$ units of flux through the $S^2$. The symmetry of the induced on the brane metric is $AdS_3\times S^1\times S^2$. The brane ends on an $\mathbb{R}^{(1,1)}$ subspace of the 4-dimensional $AdS_5$ boundary resulting to a codimension-2 defect. We first prove that our brane configuration is stable by showing that the masses of all the fluctuations of the transverse to the brane coordinates respect the B-F bound. On the field theory side, the 2-dimensional defect is described by a classical solution whose precise form we determine. Subsequently, we calculate the one-point functions of the energy-momentum tensor and of the chiral primary operators (CPOs), first at strong and then at weak coupling. In an appropriate limit, we find compelling agreement between the weak and strong coupling results. Furthermore, we also extract one of the B-type Weyl anomaly coefficients.